Captain's Log: January Etsy Town Hall Webcast

Hello!
So this is my very FIRST blog post as your new SF Etsy team Co-Captain! OMG, I'm so excited. Even and I have been working behind the scenes the past couple of weeks planning some upcoming events and we can't wait to share them with you! We were discussing how to best communicate with you what's on our minds and our plans and so you will be seeing more blog posts from both of us in the course of the next year.

I want to kick off this first "Captain's Log" for 2014 by sharing with you a little summary of the most recent Etsy Town Hall webcast.
If you haven't attended one of these before, I highly recommend it. I will try to remember to post a link in the forum so that you have plenty of time to sign up and view these webcasts in real time. It's really easy and it's all completed in your browser. However, if you missed it, here's a summary and I included a link below.

The Town Hall meeting began with Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson's mention of the recent Economist article featuring Etsy, titled "The art and craft of business" - it's a must read, so please do so at your leisure :)

The real meat and potatoes of the webcast  came in two sections. The first was communicated by Nickey Skarstad who is in charge of Seller Experience. She discussed how in 2014 Etsy is working to improve the listings manager functionality as well as improving the shipping calculator. 

In 2014, Etsy plans to vastly improve how you manage your listings. This will be especially important to those of us who want to make changes across all of our listings at once. She discussed easier ways to change prices or descriptions. I'm personally really looking forward to those improvements!

Next, there was a discussion about shipping and making it faster and more efficient to ship items from your shop. We've all experienced that feeling of dread when you go to the post office and realize you've under charged for shipping and now you are eating into your profits. The new shipping features will be designed to minimize that from happening. 

Secondly, Heather Jassy who is the head of Member Operations at Etsy dug into the improvements in problem resolution and some policy changes.  Etsy has implemented a couple of new ways to resolve your issues when you need to ask questions to Etsy directly. They want to improve all the help channels available to sellers. This includes a new contact form, changes to the forum and they have launched telephone support. Currently only a few issues are available on the telephone support channel, but more issues will be added in the future. Also, Etsy plans to implement Live Chat Support. These changes will greatly improve how we can communicate with Etsy when issues arise.  

She also discussed briefly, the recent policy changes. These changes are designed to keep Etsy in line with their core values as a platform for handmade, supplies and vintage goods. If you missed the Town Hall meeting about the policy changes, you can watch it here.

If you will be expanding your business, you will need to communicate to Etsy about how you make your items. One way is to make sure you have your About Me section updated and have included pictures of how your items come to life. Our SFEtsy team will be having a "Tell Your Story" bootcamp class in March to help you write and update this section. Stay tuned for more details :)

Etsy also plans to improve the look and feel of your shop's homepage. I'm really interested in seeing what improvements are going to be made in this section. 

Finally, all three executives took questions from the in-studio audience and the online attendees. This was moderated by the cutest Etsy admin Kimm Alfonso of Kimmchi. She's one of the folks at Etsy that helps us out with our team - We {heart} her! 

If you missed the webcast, you can view it online here.

Have a great week!

Rebecca Saylor

SF Etsy Team Co-Captain

Owner / Designer at OodleBaDoodle

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